“If you could only imprison a thought, then intellectual tyranny might succeed. If you could only take an argument and put a striped suit of clothes on it -- if you could only take a good, splendid shining fact and lock it up in some dungeon of ignorance, so that its light would never again enter the mind of man, then you might succeed in stopping human progress. Otherwise, no.”

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

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Robert G. Ingersoll 439
Union United States Army officer 1833–1899

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